Direct Currency Conversion

ABSTRACT

This invention concerns direct currency conversion, that is automatic currency conversion at point of payment for card transactions. In particular it concerns a method for operating equipment associated with a financial transaction. The method includes the steps of: Presenting a card related to a customer&#39;s account. Recording a card number from the card. Applying all or part of the card number to a tree structure, and automatically processing that number by the tree one bit at a time to arrive at an end node of the tree coded with information related to the currency of the customer&#39;s card account. Determining the currency of the customer&#39;s card account. Comparing the currency of the customer&#39;s card account with one or more currencies predetermined for the equipment. Where the comparison indicates different currencies, providing direct currency conversion services. In other aspects it concerns the equipment itself, and a method of preparing a tree structure for use by the equipment.

TECHNICAL FIELD

This invention concerns direct currency conversion, that is automaticcurrency conversion at point of payment for card transactions. Inparticular it concerns a method for operating equipment associated witha financial transaction. In other aspects it concerns the equipmentitself, and a method of preparing a tree structure for use by theequipment.

BACKGROUND ART

Credit cards, debit cards, charge cards and various other types of cardsare used by consumers to make purchases or to obtain cash. Thesetransactions generally take place at a merchant's premises using anelectronic Point of Sale (POS) device, and during the transaction thedevice communicates with other parties to obtain authorization for thetransaction, and to initiate the transfer of funds from the customer tothe merchant. Similar transactions take place using computer equipmentwithout the intermediary of a merchant.

With increasing international travel, globalization of business andelectronic commerce, cardholders sometimes wish to conduct transactionsin a foreign country using their card. In this case the merchant wouldnormally use a particular currency, which, in the case of a retailer,would generally be the local currency. The credit card would also have acurrency, which would generally be the local currency of its issuingbank. Conventionally, for transactions where the two currencies aredifferent, the currency of the transaction would be the currency of themerchant, and would appear as such, together with an exchange rate onthe credit card statement. Dynamic currency conversion (DCC) allows atransaction of this kind to be conducted in the currency of the card, bydetecting the card currency and applying a currency conversion at thetime of the transaction, so that the cardholder sees the value of thetransaction in the currency of the card, at that time.

In a simple example of a purchase by a holidaymaker, a POS device woulddetect the card number and extract the Bank Identification Number (BIN).The machine would associate the BIN with a currency, take this to be thecurrency of the card and conduct the sale/purchase in the card currency.

DISCLOSURE OF THE INVENTION

In a first aspect the invention is a method for operating equipmentassociated with a financial transaction to determine the currenciesavailable to be used for a card transaction using that equipment. Themethod includes the steps of:

Presenting a card related to a customer's account.

Recording a card number from the card.

Applying all or part of the card number to a tree structure, andautomatically processing that number by the tree one bit at a time toarrive at an end-node of the tree coded with information related to thecurrency of the customer's card account.

Determining the currency of the customer's card account.

Comparing the currency of the customer's card account with one or morecurrencies predetermined for the equipment.

Where the comparison indicates different currencies, providing directcurrency conversion services.

Traversing through a tree structure is highly efficient, since only datacontaining information relevant to the current enquiry is read. This isespecially beneficial where the mapping is many to one, as it is inmapping BINs to currency codes.

The equipment may be a Point of Sale (PoS) device, an automated tellermachine (ATM) or equipment associated with telephone or Internet sales.In the case of telephone or Internet sales the card details may beremotely manually entered, rather than read automatically by theequipment from the card.

The tree structure may be downloaded and stored at the equipment. Inthis case all the other steps can be performed at the equipment.

Other determinations may be made from the card number, using theinvention. For instance detecting local cards, or trading area cards.This may be of use for instance in controlling qualification for taxfree shopping etc.

The equipment generally comprises a card reader, a computer processorand memory, a printer and a user interface. The tree structure may bestored in the memory in the form of a file. The tree may be a sparsebinary tree. The end-nodes of the tree structure may be coded withcountry codes or currency codes.

The step of determining the currency may involve merely interpreting thecodes at the end-node. Alternatively, this step may involve furtherprocessing such as using the end-code to look up a currency code in anancillary table.

The comparing step may default to a predetermined currency in the eventthat a match is found, for instance the native currency of the countrywhere the equipment is located. Alternatively, and when no match isfound, all currencies of the card and device may be displayed for thecustomer's choice. The relevant exchange rates may also be displayed.

The processing and currency selection by the customer may precede theprinting of a docket for the customer's approval. The docket may includethe price in the currency selected and in the native currency of theequipment as well as the exchange rate, and all these numbers may becaptured for use in preparing a statement for the customer's account.

In another aspect the invention is equipment associated with a financialtransaction comprising a card reader, computer processor and memory, aprinter and a user interface, wherein a tree structure is stored as afile in the memory to process a number read by the card reader one bitat a time to arrive at an end-code of the tree coded with informationrelated to a currency.

In a further aspect the invention is a method of preparing a treestructure for use in the method and saving it as a file, thendownloading the file to the equipment associated with a fmancialtransaction where it is stored for use in the method. The tree structuremay be refined by removing duplicate nodes, mirror nodes and singlesided nodes before being downloaded.

BRIEF DESCRIPTION OF THE DRAWINGS

An example of the invention will now be described with reference to theaccompanying drawings, in which:

FIG. 1 is a block diagram of the functional environment of a Point ofSale device.

FIG. 2 is a binary sparse tree.

BEST MODES OF THE INVENTION

Referring first to FIG. 1, a typical card transaction involves acustomer presenting their card 1 to a merchant to purchase goods orservices. The merchant swipes the card 1 through a card-reader 2 whichis part of a POS device 3. The card reader 2 reads the card number 4from the card 1, and the device 3 determines the currency of thecustomer's card account. The device is then able to present the cost tothe customer in the currency of their account whether they are at homeor abroad.

When the customer is at home, the device realizes that both merchant andcustomer prefer to use the same currency, and the transaction isconsidered not to be eligible for direct currency conversion.

When the customer is abroad the device is also able to provide the rateof exchange being applied, and the cost in the local currency. Thecustomer may choose whether to accept the price in either currency, andto confirm the exchange rate that will apply to the transaction if theychoose the currency of their account. In this way, the customer is ableto have full details of the transaction before receiving a statementfrom the card issuer.

To enable this functionality the device 3 stores a binary sparse tree ina file. A tree is a series of distinct pathways, each made up of anumber of links between nodes. Each node would normally have two outwardlinks representing “1” and “0”. So a pathway would be a binary numbermade up of “1”s and “0”s. The pathways are made to represent BINs inbinary form and end in the currency appropriate to that BIN. It thenfollows that if a BIN is converted to binary form and mapped on to thetree, it will yield the currency of the card carrying the BIN.

FIG. 2 is a simplified example of such a tree and has been generated todecode the following four bit numbers 0001, 0010, 0011, 1001, 1010, 1011and 1110.

It can be seen that binary numbers do not appear in the tree. Instead ateach node there is a binary decision to be made. An incoming number, say1010, is processed by the tree one bit at a time. Taking the left handbit first, that is “1”, this bit is used at the first node of the tree21 to follow the path to node 22. (Had it been “0” it would havefollowed the path to node 23). At node 22 the next bit “0” is used tofollow the tree to node 24. The next bit “1” is used to follow the treeto node 25. The final bit “0” follows the tree to the currency code“GBP” at end-node 25. Note that the tree does not contain any dead endnodes, that is numbers that are not supposed to be there will result inno currency being found.

Such a tree is generated from information provided by the card networks6 (for instance Visa or MC), information received from issuing banks 7and any other information useful in relating cards to currencies. Treegeneration is a back-office operation that takes place at a dedicatedservice provider 8.

Once a basic tree has been generated it is processed a number of timesto compress it before installing it on POS devices. These compressionprocesses are explained below: First duplicate nodes are removed. If twonodes A and B are the same, then all other nodes pointing to B can bemodified to point at A. Then node B can be deleted. Next mirror nodesare removed. All nodes have two pointers or two currency values. If thetwo values in the node are the same then any node pointing to the mirrorcan just take the mirror node value instead. Single sided nodes can bestored in half the space. If only one side of a node has a value, suchas node 26, then that node can be stored in half the space. Thecompression process is repeated until no more changes can be effected.Compression is also done as part of the back-office operation.

The tree is prepared for a POS device to use by saving it as a file, andit is downloaded from the specialist service provider 8 to the device 3over the Internet 9. Of course, the tree may be downloaded using PSTN orany other communications media. Note that the original tree containsmemory pointers. If there are 16384 or less nodes the whole tree can bestored in less than 64 kbytes. This is important because then eachpointer can be replaced by a 16 bit offset within the file. To ensurethat reaching an end-node is correctly identified, all the end-nodes aremoved to the start of the file. Then if an offset value is above acertain value it is known not to be an end-node.

To determine the currency of a card a selected part of the card number,for instance the BIN number, is traversed through the tree, taking thecorrect branch at each node depending on the bit values of the number.As in the example above, if the card number is ten (binary value 1010)the result arrived at is ‘GBP’. Currency codes do not necessarily haveto be at the end-nodes of the tree. Other information could be presentedthere, for instance country codes. In this case the result from the treemay require further mapping to establish the appropriate currency code.For example a country code for France could be mapped to the Euro. Morecomplicated situations could also arise, for instance where a Britishbank issues a card for a US dollar account.

The financial side of the transaction may be managed by the POS device,or by a server belonging to a bank or card issuer. The POS device or theserver may collect particular data related to DCC transactions, andstore it in a DCC statistical data packet for transmission to the DCCOperating Company. This company may be a bank or card issuer or anotherparty. The packet may be analysed and a report produced.

The data allows for the performance to be monitored. In the event ofpoor performance the DCC Operator can decide to carry out re-training orremove the service. On the other hand good performance can lead toactivation of a reward under an incentive program.

The value fields collected to enable the service performance to bemeasured include, Total number of sale-type transactions; Total numberof potential DCC sale-type transactions; Total number of actual DCCsale-type transactions; Total value of all sale-type transactions; Totalvalue of potential DCC sale-type transactions; Total value of actual DCCsale-type transactions; Total number of refund-type transactions Totalnumber of potential DCC refund-type transactions; Total number of actualDCC reflnd-type transactions; Total value of all reftnd-typetransactions; Total value of potential DCC refund-type transactions;Total value of actual DCC refund-type transactions. All amounts are inbase currency of the PoS device or server.

After a successful transmission of a stats block to the rates downloadhost all the stats counters and amount totals should be reset to 0.

Pre-auths and supplemental pre-auths should be ignored for statspurposes.

A tip, if added to the value of an existing transaction, should updatethe total by just the tip amount, but not increment the transactioncount. However if a tip is a completely separate transaction it shouldbe treated as a normal sale. A void transaction should decrement theappropriate totals and decrement the appropriate counts. Potential DCCqualified transactions refers to transactions that qualify as DCCeligible and may or may not be accepted. Actual DCC qualifiedtransactions refers to transactions that qualify as DCC eligible andwere accepted and converted. Terminal non-DCC qualified transactionsrefer to transactions that did not qualify at all as DCC eligible. i.e.the card prefix was not recognised by the DCC currency recognitionmodule.

Although the invention has been described with reference to a particularexample, it should be appreciated that many variations are possible. Forinstance, a simple modification of the file size to 256 kbytes using 16bit indices allows the maximum number of nodes to be increased to 65536.It is also possible to avoid moving the end-nodes to the start of thefile.

It will be appreciated by persons skilled in the art that numerousvariations and/or modifications may be made to the invention as shown inthe specific embodiments without departing from the spirit or scope ofthe invention as broadly described. The present embodiments are,therefore, to be considered in all respects as illustrative and notrestrictive.

1. A method for operating equipment associated with a financial transaction to determine the currencies available to be used for a card transaction using that equipment; the method includes the steps of: presenting a card related to a customer's account; recording a card number from the card; applying all or part of the card number to a tree structure, and automatically processing that number by the tree one bit at a time to arrive at an end-node of the tree coded with information related to the currency of the customer's card account; determining the currency of the customer's card account; comparing the currency of the customer's card account with one or more currencies predetermined for the equipment; wherein, the comparison indicates different currencies, providing directed currency conversion services.
 2. A method according to claim 1, wherein the equipment is one of: a Point of Sale (PoS) device, an automated teller machine (ATM) or equipment associated with telephone or Internet sales.
 3. A method according to claim 2, wherein, in the case of a PoS device or an ATM, the step of recording a card number from the card involves the equipment automatically reading the number.
 4. A method according to claim 2, wherein, in the case of telephone or Internet sales, the step of recording a card number from the card involves remotely manually entering the number.
 5. A method according to claim 1, wherein the tree structure is downloaded and stored at the equipment.
 6. A method according to claim 1, wherein other determinations are made from the card number.
 7. A method according to claim 6, wherein the other determination is detecting local cards.
 8. A method according to claim 6, wherein the other determination is detecting trading area cards.
 9. A method according to claim 1, wherein the equipment comprises a card reader, a computer processor and memory, a printer and a user interface.
 10. A method according to claim 9, comprising the further step of storing the tree structure in the memory in the form of a file.
 11. A method according to claim 10, wherein the tree is a sparse binary tree.
 12. A method according to claim 10, wherein the end-nodes of the tree structure are coded with country codes or currently codes.
 13. A method according to claim 1, wherein the step of determining the currency involves merely interpreting the codes at the end-node.
 14. A method according to claim 1, wherein the step of determining the currency involves using the end-code to look up a currency code in an ancillary table.
 15. A method according to claim 1, wherein the step of comparing defaults to a predetermined currency in the event that a match is found.
 16. A method according to claims 1, wherein, when no match is found, all currencies of the card and device are displayed.
 17. A method according to claim 16, wherein the relevant exchange rates are also displayed.
 18. A method according to claim 1, further comprising the step of printing a docket.
 19. A method according to claim 18, wherein the docket includes the price in the currency selected and in the native currency of the equipment as well as the exchange rate.
 20. A method according to claim 19, wherein all the numbers displayed are captured for use in preparing a statement for the customer's account.
 21. Equipment associated with a financial transaction comprising a card reader, computer processor and memory, a printer and a user interface, wherein a tree structure is stored as a file in the memory to process a number read by the card reader one bit at a time to arrive at an end-code of the tree coded with information related to a currency.
 22. A method of preparing a tree structure for use in the method according to claim 1, and saving the tree structure as a file, then downloading the file to the equipment associated with a financial transaction where it is stored for use in the method.
 23. A method according to claim 12, wherein the tree structure is refined by removing duplicate nodes, mirror nodes and single sided nodes before being downloaded. 